My argument about video games and how they help people not vice versa

Video Games.  Are they a problem with America’s modern generation?   My answer is (No!)  Though, many people disagree, my answer is a firm negative for many reasons.  Modern media blame video games for school shootings (and stabbings), suicides, disabling fatal mental conditions, and forms of antisocial behaviors. I know for a fact they are wrong. My personal experiences refute these negative connections between videogames and disaster.

My interaction with these games have helped me survive many problems as I faced various lifetime experiences. Rather than causing me to be a social recluse, they expanded my social interactions. Involvement with gaming caused me to avoid the pitfalls of drugs and made me focus. This focus even aided in my realistic plans for future life and job preparation.

Growing up I was an only child going through a rough divorce, my family looked at me as an object more than their son.  Video games were my escape from that. I could bring the video game console from my mother’s house to my father’s house.  I looked forward to go home so I could play my game. It meant the world to come home and play uninterrupted.  My parents struggled making the money to feed me and afford rent, so we moved a lot.  I never had the time to find friends with moving so frequently, Video games helped me deal with the loneliness.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  When I was in fifth grade I moved to Kachina Village where my dad settled down and bought a house. In seventh grade my mom moved to Mountain Air, which is very close to Kachina. I was able to make friends and hang out, my new friends and i would do all sorts of stuff but we always would play video games.   When I was fourteen I decided to buy an Xbox 360. I earned every cent from raking yards in the summer and shoveling driveways in the winter. I made an Xbox live account and started playing online, at the time it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.  My friends started coming over to my house to play my new Xbox, I became popular. 

In high school the friends I made started smoking weed and drinking. I experimented the drugs but I got sick. Instead of hanging out with my friends, I started playing Xbox live and making friends online. Most of my old friends got busted and went to jail, some even accidentally burnt down a house.  I am glad I stayed at home and out of trouble, although I am sorry i missed out on the fun they had when they didn't caught and do drugs. At the time I didn't care I was not the one foolish enough to get arrested the only thing I was focused on was school and my video game skill. Also the new friends I made while gaming became like brothers not just friends. When gaming online you can join a gaming clan, this clan becomes your team.  One day my new found brother Jacob Dobbs and I created the [LOVE] clan, we started inviting all of our close gamer friends. In just the first month we had fifteen people join the clan. Those fifteen people will always be my best friends, because they are careful individuals who help me and like me for who i am, not for the amount for drugs I do. 

Today I am attending college for software and video game engineering and design. My goal is to make games for the next generation that have a life like mine and just need an escape, because an escape from reality is necessary to avoid depression! I struggle with ADHD and severe depression. I find it very hard to do everything for twelve credit hours of school, alongside working at a Habitat for Humanity Restore. Now I have no time to play video games and I don’t because it affects my grades, the only thing Video games are bad for is school!

Are video games a problem with America’s modern generation? Do they corrupt people into shooting innocent students or boosting America’s suicide rates? Or do they truly help people by giving them a simple hobby that gives them an escape from reality?  Why don’t critics blame the modern movies and TV shows; which contain adult situations and profanity that a small child can watch? Maybe the media is corrupt. Maybe they are brainwashing us to make us think how they want us to think. This concerns me.  Research on how advertising companies create ads it truly is scary. In result I stopped watching TV, and switched over to instant Netflix.

Video games help everyday people get through life. Video games help with eyesight, hand eye coordination, faster decision making. Video games help people deal with mental trauma. Kids and adults that have cancer and going through chemo therapy play video games and become less stressed.  It helped me with depression, stress, and influences that might have gotten arrested.

Video games offer way more than TV. When you watch TV your brain literally shuts off, and you become a channel surfing zombie. Video games allow you to control what's happening, this promotes positive brain function. Video games most of the time have a more complicated more complex plot and storyline than famous novels, Video games make you the protagonist, you feel there loss and emotion. Video games simply make you feel bad ass!

          Playing video games never made me a trained killer. Video games have shown me creative ways to think not to kill. A Video game is a lot like a book but more complex and difficult to understand and create. The player participates in the creation of the plot, the reader merely absorbs it. Video games are art just appreciate them. 

build anything 

get eaten by monsters

and get eaten by powerful boss's

Terraria is another indi platformer sandbox game, its fun until monsters come out of hiding and eat you.  there is no objective in this game, its alot like playing with legos without the manual.




the bad thing about the game at first its hard to survive  due to lack of armour. so until you craft a sword and armour your not going to be able to do much without getting killed. but once you craft armour the game suddenly becomes fun and not a pain.





after awhile you will unlock boss fights but i gave up and switched over to starbound before i found one.  seeing how starbound is alot better id recommend playing that instead. terraria was the first of its kind on the other hand so with out this game you wouldn't have starbound, for a original game ill rate this 6/10.

Starbound

your trustful space ship

build entire villages 

and explore alien settlements 

StarBound is a new indi game currently in its beta.
made by chuckle fish games - a independant UK game studio.  in many ways it plays alot like minecraft and feels very sandboxy, but its also a 2D platformer game.  when you start the game you will create a character, you can be multiple species of alien life including humans.  i picked the robots called the glitch. every race will have a differant spaceship also like you see below.

the story behind every race is that you run out of fuel for your ship and become stranded. you must teleport to the planet and search for coal to fuel your ship.



once you find fifty fuel you can travel to other planets in the current galaxy you are in.

once you find two hundred fuel you can travel to other galaxies. once you find a galaxy to your liking set the planet to your home and start building a basse-home.




you can build whatever you want but your going to first have to find the resources. chop down trees to find wood and go mining to find ore. with ore you can make tools and tech.  so you can mine faster and build your self better armour.






on planets you have a high chance of stumbling across other alien civilisations. i like to kill them and steal there stuff so i can put the decor in my home. in this game there are over 100 different galaxies and each one is different.  I really like starbound because of how open it is, i would like to see a successful beta and a even better outcome for the game. id rate starbound a 7/10 because it has some bugs but runs smooth and kills time.

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy

Jak And Daxter review 1

Jak and Daxter was the first game i ever got into, and by got into i mean addicted to. i got this game on my 7th birthday and played it till i was nine or ten. it was an outstanding game, its smooth game play witty characters and a amazing story/plot. the scenery of the game is beautiful, one of the most epic things about the scenery is that from the first level you can see the last level and every thing in between; its out standing and no other game has done this still. This is one of my most favorite games i mine as well call it my childhood. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is the first installment in the Jak and Daxter series, developed by Naughty Dog Inc. and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was released in December 2001 for the PlayStation 2 Unlike previous 3D games, The Precursor Legacy was unique in that it delivered a world without loading times - all transitions between areas are seamless. The world is split up into three hubs (excluding the final location) connected by warp gates. These hub areas are unlocked in sequence by obtaining a certain number of Power Cells in each. All of the game's areas have unique atmosphere, enemies, design and gameplay aspects. As Jak and Daxter's journey takes them further inland, the heroes will visit areas including a beach, a jungle, a swamp, a forgotten underwater city, a racecourse built around the ruins of a Precursor Temple, a snow covered mountain, a spider infested cave, and Gol and Maia's ominous citadel, the final stage of the game. - http://jakanddaxter.wikia.com/wiki/Jak_and_Daxter:_The_Precursor_Legacy

      
       To start off you play as Jak a young adventurer, with his best friend Daxter who is changed into a small orange squirrel thing. one day Jak and Daxter was exploring misty island of the cost of sand over village. when they were on mist island the came across a precursor ruin. the precursors were a highly advanced race, they vanished and nobody knows where they went. the green sage tell you that "hes asked the plants but they don't know i asked the plants to ask the rocks but the rocks dont know, even the rocks do not know."  while exploring that precursore ruin they come across a vat of Dark Ego. near that vat Daxter find a precursor artifact, and throughs it a Jak. Jak catches it andit starts glowing red. soon A lurker jumps out and attacks Jak, there are many types of lurkers they are the enimys in the game. Jak throughs the red glowing artifact. it explodes and jak gets pushed into daxter, knocking Daxter into the Vat of Dark Ego. a few secounds later daxter flys out of the vat, it changed him into a small orange mongoose thing. they rush back to the sage in sand over village.

       once you get to the sage he tells you there is nothing he can do to change Daxter back. the sage tells jak that there is a sage to the north Far Far to the north who studies Dark Ego. but nobody has herd from him in years. this is your quest for the game! to get to the north your going to overcome dangerous obstacles and terrifying lurker monsters.
   
      Sandover village. 

this is a Precursor orb

   To get to rock village from sandover village your going to need twenty powercells to boost the heat shield in your zoomer to pass over a canyon filled with lava. to find powercells you need to to jobs for people inside the village or buy them with precursor orbs. you can also find them inside precursor ruins.

This is a Zoomer

the first boss

Jak finding a powercell

From Sandover village there are 3 areas you can search for power cells-

 Forbidden Jungle, Sentinel Beach, Misty Island.

inside the forbidden jungle you find the first boss.

Rock village

Once you get through fire canyon on your zoomer you arrive in rock village.

first thing you find is the blue sages hut, the hut looks like there was a

struggle like something kidnapped him. the hut over looks the village from atop

a cliff. the village is on fire and there is giant boulders on fire that are crushing homes. 

You go and investigate the village and notice that there is a giant monster lurker throwing 

bolder on to the village. the way to get to him is blocked by a 30 ton boulder blocking the 

way up the cliff. the blue sage crated a devise to move the boulder but it requires 45 powercells.

to get more powercells you are going to have to Boggy Swamp, the Precursor basin

 and Lost Precursor City.

the second boss

once you deafeat the secound boss jak gets to fly his zoomer through 

mountain pass. the mountain pass is full of explosives for you to run into.

you also have to beat the three lurkers, so that they dont detonate the pass

and kill jak. once you get to the detonator you have arived inside the volcanic crater.

here you will find the red sages hut and the next set of maps for you to explore.

from the red sages hut you can explore the mountain top and the spider cave. on the mountain top there is a lurker fort.  in the spider cave the lurkers are digging out a ancient precursor robot. once you obtain all the powercells you must go through the lava tunnel to get to the final part of the game gol and myas citadel.

once at gol and myas citadel you need to free all four sages to distroy the forcfild around gol and myas evil doomsday robot.

 

on the left is the blue sage, in the middle is the red sage, on the right  is samos the green sage and on the bottom is the yellow sage. 

  once all sages have been freed they destroy the shield so jak can destroy the robot. but the robot takes off and now guess who has to chase it down. yep the hero jak aka you. 

the final boss fight is with gol and myas robot. once you destroy all of the robots weapons, the game will drop white ego.  and you instant kill them they crash into a container of dark ego. once you meet up with all the sages they thank you for the help. there is also a huge precursor door that takes  powercells to open. once you gather enough powercells

open the door to completely beat the game. i like jak and daxter id give it a 10/10.

Pokemon Y

   

Id just like to start by saying i got a 3Ds for Xmas and i love it! The first game i got for it is Pokemon Y and that's what ill be blogging about this evening.

  Pokemon Y i felt brought redemption to the series in outstanding ways.  First off the step up in graphics are out standing, whether it be the battles or scenery there just a nice to look at. im happy they moved of there 8 bit engine. the pokemon in battle move with very nice detail attacking or standing and are not just a sliding one frame spright. but graphics do not make a good game.
  
  Pokemon Y has ways to go beyond the old and time consuming ways you would  raise and evolve your pokemon.  After obtaining your second gym badge a reporter will give you the exp share. the exp share is the best item in the game by far because it give exp to all your pokemon for every battle this makes evolving all of your pokemon and not just your starter. It simply makes catching them all and filling up you pokedex that much easier.(one of the games hardest objectives)
fair is fair i guess there are over 300 pokemon now.

  The best part is the story.  you start in a small town just like any other pokemon game, and the starter pokemon are nothing special. before you leave this town you can by pokeballs which is new . the first pokemon i caught was a pidgy that was my primary pokemon for the first tenth of the game.  after the first town you go through a forest all of you friends in the game appear and scater of doing there own thing. one fallows you and heals your pokemon which is also new.  inside the forest you run into wild pikachus every where, in the older games they were insainly hard to find. im sure alot of the older players felt the same joy i did. from here you travel accross the world obtaining all the gym badges to defeat the elite four and the pokemon champion so you can take his place. i was sad to not see team rocket but they were replace by team flare. there the same thing prety much and the antagonists of the game. id rate pokemon y a 6 out of 10.

          Fallout 3 is a role playing game made by Bethesda. The game takes place in a 1950s style post nuclear apocalypse of Washington DC destroyed by the nuclear war with America and China.  The wasteland is a rough dry hard place, and every day is a fight for survival. A place where a bullet is more important than a meal.  You are only a Vault Dweller chasing after his father in the heart of Americas capital nuclear wasteland, and doing anything to survive to be reunited one day.

           Mankind survived the nuclear apocalypse by building massive underground bomb shelters called Vaults.  When the radiation cleared up some Vault Dwellers decided to crawl out of the Vaults, to rebuild humanity.  But then some vaults, like Vault 101, felt it was safer to stay inside and made it illegal to wonder out into the wastes.

          You start out by being born, but during your birth your mom dies.  Two years go by, and you are a little baby that can barely walk. Your dad tells you about your mom’s favorite Bible verse, Revelation 21:6 “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.” As your dad stops reading he walks out of the room. While he is out you escape your playpen, there is a book in bottom of a toy box, and this book called "You Are Special" lets you pick your character's initial primary statistics.

          In games like Fallout 3 you can choose what your character’s talents and abilities.  Whenever you level up the game will give you fifteen skill points to assign to any skill. The skills in the game will help you in combat. Skills make you stealthy, give you the ability to hack computers and pick locks, and they let you become better at bartering in stores and with traders.

          On your tenth birthday, the vault overseer gives you a Pepboy 3000. A Pepboy is a computer that you ware around your forearm, and you use it to keep inventory, check your health and look at a map.   The Pepboy 3000 is the most helpful thing in the game because it’s a way to manage everything on your character.

       When you are sixteen, you take a test called the Goat. The Goat is the standard test inside all the vaults, and the results will tell you what your character skills are. It also will assign fifteen skill points to your top three skills. When you are eighteen you wake up to your best friend Amata telling you to get up, because her dad the overseer is going to kill you.  Amata explains that your dad broke out of the vault, and if you don’t go after him, you will die.

          You can grab anything in the vault; anything you take will help you in the long run, so take as much as you can.  Vault 101 security members will shoot you onsite; you can choose to be stealthy and sneak around them or kill them.  Once you reach the overseer’s office, you must hack his terminal. When hacked, a secret staircase opens behind his desk. The passage leads the only way out of Vault 101. 

          There will be a switch on you right, and when activated the gigantic blast door screeches open. As you leave the blast door shuts behind you, and you can’t get back in. There is no turning back so you must venture out into the DC wasteland. As you walk outside all you can see is a heavenly bright light. A few seconds go by, and the brightness fades into devastation.

            Blown-up homes and buildings to scavenge and explore, clouds of radiation, terrifying mutated creatures, and treasures long forgotten await you in the DC wasteland.  The changes you make around the wasteland will affect the rebuilding of humanity.  

Fallout 3 is my favorite game because from this point, the game fallout 3 is enormous and you can go anywhere you want freely. Its multiple twisted story lines and the things you can find are amazing and quite frightening. The re play value never dies and if I had to rate this game, I would give it a twenty out of ten. This game is truly a masterpiece, and I highly recommend playing it.